Not a Puppy guru but an experienced user of DVD-RAM. I'll add a bit to this old thread in case someone else finds it via a search.

DVD-RAM is generally problematic. It would be easier if a DVD-RAM drive handled only DVD-RAM disks, or if those disks could be assumed to be in some standard format. Many recent multi-drives show up in Windows as DVD-RAM drives to the puzzlement of users who never heard of DVD-RAM;-) To make matters worse, you may not actually be able to read or write a DVD-RAM in that drive!

The Panasonic drivers for Windows got around some of these issues by assigning their DVD-RAM drives TWO drive letters. One was for DVD-RAM and the other for other DVD formats and CD formats as well. Panasonic also provided drivers to format the disk and to use UDF. By Windows XP, there were built-in drivers for DVD-RAM but they often did not work or at least did not provide full functionality. For example, you might have to manually switch the drive from being a CD drive to being a DVD-RAM drive -- and back.

Very few people now use DVD-RAM. Does anyone even make the media any more? In any case, with such low demand it may never be worth anyone's while to create code that sorts all this out automatically. OTOH, it should be possible to handle these manually as noted in some posts above and elsewhere on the Internet. In one case, someone mounted a DVD-RAM and formatted it as EXT2!

BTW. DVD-RAM disks have a write-protect tab like a floppy in addition to any permissions within Linux so you may have to make sure the media is writeable in both ways.